I came across this idea at some point while training to be a therapist. It’s the notion that what is left unspoken, the thing that remains hidden or secret or inaccessible, might just be the very thing that needs to be brought to light.
While I can’t declare this to be unequivocally true, what I can say is that whiteness, or my white skin and all the things that come with it, falls into this category. Much of my life has involved not talking about, thinking about, or recognizing whiteness. I learned to actively avoid noticing race and how it impacts my life. And now, after some time working at paying attention to race, what it means for me, and how it influences our world, I’ve found that whiteness is the thing that I need to talk about.
This summer marked a little over 2 decades of being married to the most superb human that I know and over 20 years of being in an interracial partnership. Wedding a black man and setting up our home in the US, has made race an inevitable part of my everyday life in a way that I’d never known before. So, in these 20 plus years of noticing race and getting to know my own whiteness, here’s just a few things I’ve found that I need to keep talking about:
Whiteness cannot be trusted. It was created for destruction. As a social construct, ideology, and culture, whiteness was established to hold onto power. This means it was made to destroy shared humanity and equity. But possessing white skin doesn’t mean that I’m destined for evil or that I must take up this cause, I can do and be different. First, though, I must recognize and understand whiteness and what I’ve absorbed of it. For me, this means I need to work on practices of questioning, relearning, and accepting who white people have been.
As a group, we white folk don’t have a great track record of being trustworthy. We do, however, have a good history of enacting power over, creating systems of advantage to best serve our needs, and writing a narrative that says other than what is true of us. Though I am not responsible for how other people have been or what they have done, I am accountable to my history — to know it and determine what to do with it. Do I perpetuate what’s been passed down to me? The real and true background of white people — data that’s very different from the story of white people that I learned — calls for recognition, relearning, and redress. Looking more closely at race shows that people of color have long not trusted whiteness — and with good reason. I have much to learn from the enduring wisdom of others and learning about whiteness is necessary so that I can work to undo it (to see some of the materials that I relied on to help grow my understanding, see this books page or this resources page).
When people bring up race, racial inequity, or racism, it is not an affront to me personally. It’s also not about picking on white people. Ideas like these were central and were passed along in the mostly white world of my childhood. Sadly, they became deeply rooted in me. The truth of racism is that it is a collective problem that I, a part of the collective, was taught to ignore or story away. But this problem requires white people to join in the shared project of ending it. I know this and yet sometimes still feel defensive when others, who are consistently oppressed by our racial structure, talk about their experiences of oppression. Whiteness influences me so acutely that my reactions are other than what I wish them to be — it’s disturbing when I have this twisted response to another’s pain. When someone shares of the abuse and violence they encounter at the hands of our social system — due to race or anything else — I want to be one who listens and joins in the work of fixing or taking apart the system. I’ve needed to ask myself: Why am I thinking of myself rather than hearing another person’s pain? Why do I feel attacked by someone relaying the experiences of their life? I’m obviously impacted by what they’ve said, so what is my connection to this oppression? What about my racial identity and what I learned of race is connected to their experience of racialized subjugation?
Whiteness taught me how to play the role of oppressor and, when called out, to play the role of victim. Whiteness works to keep us all bound, to circumscribe identity, and limit our possibility of creating something new. In our current racial construct, I’m not free. I’m stuck in whiteness. This stuck-ness makes me lose imagination for who I am and for how the world can be. So I ask, how does whiteness keep me rooted where I am? How does whiteness impact my relationships and how I see myself? Where do I need to be made free? What do I dream for how things can be and what is next for me to do to bring it about?
The way that I was socialized to be in the world as a white person does not align with my values. I feel pressured to be a certain way and this way conflicts with how I want to be. This misalignment creates turmoil. I struggle to find language for this and am learning that, with practice (such as writing here), I’m growing. I have to continuously ask: What is required of me to live out my beliefs that justice should be for everyone and that resources and opportunity should be shared equally? How does this differ from what I learned about white people and racial inequity? Who is my community and what are the practices of accountability that help me to live out my values?
The first way that I learned to examine the effects of racism and undo racial inequality, revolved around the question, what is going wrong with people of color? I was concerned with attending to the problem of racial inequity by only looking at the impacts of racism on its targets. I didn’t consider the ways this problem influences and implicates me. I’ve found that it makes sense and is more actionable for me to be asking, what’s going on with white people? How are we involved in upending the racial inequity rampant in our world? What will it take for this problem to be — not just an issue for people of color — but also a real concern for us?
I have felt and known race — even if I didn’t have the words or cognizant ideas to express it. This is the result of living in a racialized society — we can’t avoid race in the US. I have been learning what it means to be white since birth. Whiteness has always been with me — so normal and close that I couldn’t recognize it as something other than a part of who I am. I need to continue learning how to answer, what have I learned from whiteness? How has whiteness influenced who I am and who I have been?
One of the most meaningful things I’ve learned on this journey is that the whiteness I’ve been absorbing doesn’t do me or anyone else any good. My racial socialization taught me to maintain a racial imbalance that hurts all of us. White people convincing ourselves that we have no part in present day racism, while playing a big part in it, is living a lie at the cost of our humanity. I can and must do and be different than what whiteness would prescribe for me — I don’t have to go along with the racial structure and my preordained place in it. Examining whiteness has shown me that, though creating something new can feel troublesome, overwhelming, and alienating, the benefit truly outweighs the cost.
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